Janie Seguí Rodríguez: - 21 Who Made a Difference in RI in 2021

Janie Seguí Rodríguez: - 21 Who Made a Difference in RI in 2021

Janie Seguí Rodríguez, founder and chair of the board of Stop the Wait RI, has emerged as the leader of an ever-growing group of parents that is speaking out about the lack of access to slots for public charter schools and is now talking about the plight of children on Providence schools.

This legislative session, when teachers' unions tried to block the expansion of public charter schools, Seguí Rodríguez led the effort to organize parents and nearly 400 signed up to testify in opposition to legislation during a hearing before the House Finance Committee.

The parents, overwhelmingly minority mothers from Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls, and Woonsocket. were forced to wait hours to testify.

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“There are parents who directly are stakeholders or parents who were previous students within the school system and either are charter parents now because they wanted an alternative school system for their children or you know parents who simply want more options -- and there are lots of parents, we come in all different from all different parts of the state and but we all have the same goal and that's really for our children to have opportunities available to them for them to be successful,” said Seguí Rodríguez.

She cites that there are more than 18,000 parents who applied for charter school slots for their children and that thousands and thousands will be turned away.

“This is why it's so important again to have options, because unless you've gone through it, you don't know how desperate that is for a parent to feel that their child is not getting what they need, that they're advocating for and it doesn't matter what they say that nothing is changing year after year and that they're they're seeing their kids potential kind of waste away,” said Seguí Rodríguez.

Before her daughter finally secured a slot at a charter school, she said, “What I worried about as a parent was when my fifth grader couldn't even write a proper sentence. I worried that she couldn't even work in a call center.”

 

Providence -- The Next Battle Ground

Seguí Rodríguez said that the battle persists and that her group will continue to grow and work on issues in Providence. Providence in 2019 was named one of the worst school systems in America by Johns Hopkins University.

Since then the much-needed reform movement has been mired in controversies and leadership turnover.

“It's important for parents to continue to mobilize. There are definitely different groups where parents can tap into —  Stop the Wait, of course, and we will continue to mobilize families. We're up to about 600 families now and we're definitely looking to start -- we're already starting to work on initiatives that we care about and want to see for the next legislative session,” she said.

"It's hard to change anything as an individual but collectively as a body that's where we really have power," Seguí Rodríguez.